CyberThrill

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CyberThrill is one of the first and now-defunct online casinos, which gained it notoriety for one of the largest organised international sponsorship (and gambling) frauds, through its ad serving program. Formed in 1997 and located in Nassau, Bahamas, the company was represented by the Canadian firm Internet Entertainment Enterprises, Inc. (based in Montreal, Canada) which also handled the casino's marketing and banner advertising program. The online casino was eventually taken offline sometime in late 2000-early 2001 by webmasters who were scammed by the program. The former location of cyberThrill was CyberThrill.com, which is today an Ad driven parked domain.

1 Ad Program
2 End of CyberThrill
3 See also
4 External links

Ad Program

CyberThrill banner that dotted hundreds of websites in the late 1990s

As one of the foremost methods of website revenue in the late 1990s, website owners used to enroll in CyberThrill's ad serving program to display banners on their websites, similar to the contemporary AdSense program (by Google). CyberThrill ran the program to exclusively send gamblers to the casino website. The program itself was administered on a per-click basis.

The reason behind CyberThrill's popularity were claims of above-average $0.20 per click-through. Many webmasters joined the program and brought traffic to the online casino, but very few got paid. CyberThrill occasionally would send out a small, first check ($5 or $10) to 'show' legitimacy to the program. However, once the user's account reached in excess of $50 to $100, the casino would withhold payment or simply terminated the contract with the webmaster, on claims that the CyberThrill's terms were breached.

Though click fraud was rampant (as has been the case with AdSense and other ad serving programs), many webmasters nonetheless earned their clicks fairly, but were still cheated by the casino.

End of CyberThrill

The online casino was eventually taken offline sometime in late 2000-early 2001 by webmasters who were scammed by the program. Webmasters created a Javascript program that registered millions of fake accounts into the CyberThrill database, forcing the company’s servers to become overloaded and preventing new members from registering.